Jonathan M. Hess (May 30, 1965 – April 9, 2018) was an American

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

and

literary scholar A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's ...

, who served as chair of the Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Department and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

Life and career

Hess earned his bachelor's degree from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

, then pursued a master's degree from

Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

before completing his graduate studies at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. His dissertation was titled “Aesthetic States: The Political Investments of Aesthetic Autonomy” (1993) and was completed under the direction of Liliane Weissberg. He joined the

faculty in 1993 and was promoted to full professor in 2003. In 2005, Hess was appointed Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Culture. Hess died suddenly on April 9, 2018. Professor Hess is survived by his wife and three children. The Jonathan M. Hess Term Professorship at the University of North Carolina was established in honor of him.

Bibliography

Authored works

*''Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy'' (Wayne State University Press, 1999) *''Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity'' (Yale University Press, 2002) *''Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity'' (Stanford University Press, 2010) *''Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage'' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Edited works

*''Literary Studies and the Pursuits of Reading'' (Camden House, 2012) *''Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader'' (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Articles (selection)

*"Ludwig Börne's Visit to the Anatomical Cabinet: The Writing of Jewish Emancipation." New German Critique 55 (1992): 105-126. *"Wordsworth's aesthetic state: the poetics of liberty." Studies in romanticism (1994): 3-29. *"Sugar Island Jews? Jewish Colonialism and the Rhetoric of" Civic Improvement" in Eighteenth-Century Germany." Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 92-100. *"Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski's" Werther the Jew" and Its Readers." Jewish social studies 11, no. 2 (2005): 202-230. *"Leopold Kompert and the work of Nostalgia: the cultural capital of German Jewish ghetto fiction." The Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 576-615. *"Moses Mendelssohn and the Polemics of History." In Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness, pp. 1-27. Brill, 2007. *"Beyond subversion: German Jewry and the poetics of middlebrow culture." The German Quarterly 82, no. 3 (2009): 316-335. *Off to America and back again, or Judah Touro and other products of the German Jewish imagination." Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19, no. 2 (2013): 1-23.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hess, Jonathan M. 1965 births 2018 deaths 20th-century American philologists 21st-century philologists University of Pennsylvania alumni Yale University alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty American academics of German literature